The hour before morning
I should be sleeping.
That thought had crossed Elara's mind at least twenty times during the last hour, and each time she had ignored it with remarkable dedication.
She knew tomorrow was going to be miserable if she kept this up. There was an eight o'clock biology lecture waiting for her in the morning, followed by a lab practical she felt embarrassingly unprepared for, and then a study session she had promised to attend despite having spent most of the week avoiding the very material she was supposed to study.
Unfortunately, none of that seemed capable of convincing her to put her phone down.
The room was dark except for the pale glow of her phone screen. It rested against her bent knees as she sat curled beneath a thin blanket, her back pressed against the wall behind her bed. Above her, the ceiling fan rotated lazily, stirring the warm night air just enough to make the loose strands of hair around her face sway whenever she shifted.
The digital clock on her lock screen read 2:43 AM. An unreasonable hour to be awake.
An even more unreasonable hour to be waiting for someone.
Yet she checked the chat again.
Nothing.
A photo of a badly decorated birthday cake still sat in their chat history. Reyes had insisted it looked professional. She had informed him it looked like a health-code violation.
He'd responded by accusing her of having no artistic vision.
In exactly five hours and seventeen minutes, she would have to drag herself out of bed, brush her hair, throw on whatever clothes looked remotely acceptable and somehow survive the molecular biology lecture she was already dreading.
Her notes were currently sitting open on her desk beside a half-finished cup of tea she'd forgotten to drink. Somewhere beneath the blanket, her fingers still smelled of highlighter ink she had spent most of the evening using.
She locked the screen.
Then unlocked it barely ten seconds later.
The moment the realization hit her, she groaned and dropped her head back against the wall.
"This is pathetic."
The words were spoken quietly enough that nobody could hear them except herself.
The embarrassing thing was that she didn't entirely disagree.
A month ago she would have laughed at the suggestion that she would stay awake this late hoping for a message from a man she had never met. She wasn't that sort of person.
At least she didn't think she was.
Elara had always enjoyed her own company. While other people seemed perfectly capable of drifting from one friendship circle to another, collecting acquaintances everywhere they went, she had never quite mastered the art of belonging to groups. Parties exhausted her. Large gatherings exhausted her. Even casual conversations sometimes felt like performances she hadn't rehearsed for.
Which was mildly ridiculous, considering she could stand in front of a classroom and present research findings without her voice shaking once.
Facts were easy.
People were considerably more complicated.
She preferred smaller things:
A quiet room.
A good book.
Fresh flowers in a vase.
Rain against a window.
The scent of a candle burning somewhere nearby.
Conversations that lasted for hours because neither person wanted them to end.
The problem was that Reyes had somehow become associated with all of those things.
Not physically, of course.
They had never met.
She didn't know what color his eyes were.
She didn't know how he smiled.
She didn't know what his voice sounded like.
For all she knew, she could walk right past him in a crowded street and never realize it.
Yet somehow, despite knowing so little about him, she had started looking forward to his presence in her day with a consistency that should have concerned her.
The vibration against her palm startled her so badly she nearly dropped the phone.
Immediately her gaze snapped to the screen. A notification banner slid into view. And just like that, the exhaustion she'd been fighting all night seemed to evaporate.
[Anonymous]: You there, my sun?
A smile spread across her face before she could stop it. It wasn't the sort of smile people usually noticed, nor the bright, effortless grin she occasionally forced for photographs. This one was smaller than that, softer somehow, existing entirely for herself. If anyone had walked into the room at that moment, they probably wouldn't have thought much of it.
Yet it carried the quiet satisfaction of finally receiving something she'd spent the last hour pretending she wasn't waiting for.
Her thumb hovered above the message.
My sun.
The nickname had started as a joke.
Weeks earlier, during one of their late-night conversations, she'd complained about always waking up before sunrise because of exams.
Reyes had responded by calling her "sunshine."
She'd informed him that it was the most embarrassing nickname in human history.
Naturally, he'd never stopped using it.
If anyone else had used it, she probably would have rolled her eyes and told them to find something less ridiculous. Coming from Reyes, however, it felt strangely personal, as though he'd chosen it deliberately. As though somewhere along the way he had noticed things about her that most people overlooked and quietly woven them into a nickname she pretended to hate. The thought was absurd, possibly even delusional, and she knew it.
Yet she reread the message anyway.
Twice.
Maybe three times.
A laugh escaped her. Then she finally typed back.
[Elara]: I'm here. I couldn't sleep.
The message was delivered instantly.
Almost immediately, the typing indicator appeared. Three small dots blinking at the bottom of the screen.
It was ridiculous how much power those dots seemed to have over her.
They shouldn't have meant anything. They were nothing more than a simple feature built into an application.
Yet every time they appeared, her pulse betrayed her. Her chest tightened in a way she found impossible to explain.
Because the truth was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
It wasn't the messages themselves she waited for.
Not really.
It was him.
Somewhere between their first conversation and tonight, Reyes had quietly slipped into places she hadn't intended to make room for anyone.
He appeared in random thoughts throughout the day.
In lectures.
In grocery stores.
In the middle of songs.
During lunch that afternoon, she had taken a photo of a pigeon stealing a pretzel from someone's plate and immediately reached for her phone. Halfway through opening their chat, she'd stopped herself.
For all she knew, Reyes could have been asleep. Busy. Working. Stuck in the middle of one of those mysterious adult responsibilities he always seemed to disappear into for hours at a time.
The point was that her first instinct had been to show him.
Not her friends.
Not the group chat she muted most of the time.
Him.
The realization should have frightened her.
Perhaps part of it did.
After all, how sensible was it to become attached to someone she'd never seen? Someone whose face existed only in fragments of imagination and vague descriptions?
Someone who still felt, in many ways, like a stranger?
Yet as she stared at those blinking dots, waiting for his reply, another realization settled quietly beside the first.
The truly embarrassing part wasn't how often she thought about him. It wasn't the fact that she'd spent an hour staring at a chat window. It wasn't even the fact that a single notification had completely transformed her mood.
It was the growing suspicion that if Reyes disappeared tomorrow, taking his messages and his nicknames and his late-night conversations with him, the absence would leave a space in her life she wouldn't know how to fill.
And that was a terrifying thing to realize about someone whose face she had never seen.
The typing indicator disappeared.
Reappeared.
Then vanished again.
Somewhere on the other side of the world, Reyes was deciding what to say next.
And somewhere between waiting for his reply and fearing it, Elara realized she was smiling again.
Because if Reyes had become this important while still being a stranger, she wasn't entirely sure what would happen when he stopped being one.
